Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

Strictly speaking not the first but the first one that wasn’t clunky and didn’t crash my tablet or throw a screenful of errors, so I’m calling it the first successful test.

So what are we seeing?

In a poorly shot video, with no audio, with terrible lighting and a tablet screen that is not only too bright, but reflects everything in front of it, at least you should get some idea of how it will (eventually) work.

We place our miniatures into a square in the bottom-left of the playing surface (offscreen in the video) to select which of our intrepid heroes will take to the board. Once the appropriate character appears on the screen, we then place them on the playing surface and their digital avatar appears on the screen.

Note how the on-screen avatar changes the direction they face, as the character moves; this is important – they always face the direction of travel. If you want to change the direction they are facing at the end of their move, you need to specifically change their facing.

You can select from all available actions for each character by simply picking them up and placing them back down in the same square. So after our first character, Sergeant Johnston is moved around a little bit, the only action(s) available is to turn around. In the video we can see that the action “rotate” has been selected and when we place the second character on the board, “Sarge” turns to face them.

The second character, Corporal North has two actions available (since not moving so much, has more action points to spend on different actions)

At the minute my digital game doesn’t follow the rules of Space Hulk so closely, with command points and so on, but will be amended once the core functionality has been built and tested.

As well as the turn to face action, “Corp” also has the fire at target action available. I really wanted to keep this for another video, but was so pleased with how this has all worked out, I couldn’t resist showing it off….

Remember in the earlier video, when demonstrating firing from one character at another, the placeholder graphic was just a white sphere (which made it look like all weapons were loaded with ping-pong balls)? And remember in another video, showing the online/web editor, we gave Corp. North a flamethrower?

Did you notice how the digital avatars onscreen are slightly different? How one is carrying an assault rifle, and another a dirty big flamer gun? Just like their online character profiles?

Check out what happens when a flamethrower is fired…. we’re not talking puny little ping-pong balls in place of lasers any more! Woof! Take that….

At the moment, all characters can suffer from the effects of friendly fire. I’m not quite sure what the rules for Space Hulk say, but I quite like it. I might keep it in.

In the meantime, I’ve got an entire spaceship to put these little digital dudes in. And only about three days to do it…..